Ape Apps Blog

The moment long feared has finally arrived, as evil aliens have touched down and invaded your high school!

Alien High is a brand new interactive story/RPG hybrid game from Ape Apps built off of the versatile Level Up engine. You are an ordinary student at Roy Munsion High School just minding your own business as usual, when suddenly an invasion of evil alien forces descends upon your school. The choices you make throughout the game will drive the course of the story line and change the direction of the game. No two play-throughs will be the same, and there are many different endings available for you to find, discover, and unlock.

So today, in continuance of my ongoing effort to rip Facebook account related stuff away from Ape Apps, I have finally replaced the Ape Market commenting system with a custom Ape Apps commenting system.

I didn't carry the old comments over, but that's ok. The new system uses your same Ape Apps Account information as everywhere else, and if you are logged in to this website here, then you will automatically be logged in there too.

I plan to tie the same comments base into the Ape Apps Launcher at some point, so that Launcher users can see ratings and reviews of games before installing them.

Throughout the last year, I have been slowly removing all things Facebook from Ape Apps, due to their abysmal track record on user data and privacy. For those concerned about privacy related to their Ape Apps Account, you should know that Ape Apps does not store any information beyond your email address and birthday (if entered when you created your account). The birthday is required by law in some countries because users under the age of 13 are not supposed to interact online without parental permission.

Today's v0.15.0 release of Gone Rogue adds an exciting (and long awaited) new gameplay element - Quests! NPC's in town and elsewhere throughout the dungeon will now occasionally offer you jobs to perform. There jobs range from killing monsters, delivering items, or farming for loot.

This week I was finalizing the v2.17.0 update for Level Up RPG (based on engine updates from an upcoming Level Up game which I am not yet announcing), and I realized that we are only a few months away now from the six year anniversary of the original v1.0 release of Level Up, which was released on November 11th, 2012.

So Level Up was one of the first games that I ever released, and it was the first game I made that had any semblance of depth or story-line. The game came out just a few months after I had decided to quit my full time job and attempt to make it as a mobile app developer. The income was not too great yet back then, and so things were sort of "do-or-die" at that time. I remember pretty vividly the night that I released the game, going to bed excited, wondering what kind of downloads and reviews it would have the next day. Luckily, even with how basic the game was, people seemed to like it, and Level Up became my first game to break the 10,000 downloads barrier, which at the time was pretty awesome for me.

A couple of years ago, I thought it would be a fun project to create my own online podcast hosting website from scratch, and so podcasts.ape-apps.com was born. The site actually worked pretty good, and I used it to host the official My Colony Podcast, which at its height was netting several thousand listeners per episode.

Since then, most of my web development efforts have focused on improving the main Ape Apps website, which is running a custom content management application that I am writing myself from scratch. At this point, I now have the full functionality of the original Ape Apps Podcasts website built in to the main Ape Apps website, rendering the old podcasts site unnecessary. I have transferred all of the old My Colony Podcast to this server, and in the coming weeks I will be shutting down the old Ape Apps Podcasts server for good.

So, for those who subscribed to the old My Colony Podcast at the old URL, the new location for the My Colony Podcast is here:
https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=2655

I don't know if I will add new episodes or not, it really depends on what people want.

So with the new Podcasting capabilities, the Ape Apps website software continues to grow and improve. The ultimate goal is to build the capabilities up to the point where I can convert my RP Forums website over to this software package, and it is getting closer by the month!

Syndication

Ape Apps is an independent software development company founded in 2010 by Brandon Stecklein. Over the years, Ape Apps has published over 400 apps and games across various platforms. You can get in touch with Brandon on Twitter or by leaving a post on his wall @bastecklein